Apres Rops

Félicien Rops (1833-1898) was a Belgian artist, primarily a print-maker. He was a friend of Baudelaire, Gautier, Mallarmé and Péladan. His work - symbolist and decadent in tone - retains its shock value over a century later. In a sequence of poems inspired by Rops' etchings and peppered with ill-translated fragments plundered from old exhibition catalogues, Hackbridge Johnson wrenches the daring reprobate into the 21st century where he is surely needed to puncture the hypocrisies of a discredited age.